Crytek -- well known for its CryENGINE game software and Crysis, a game designed to showcase the graphical might of CryENGINE -- has shifted gears in a major way with the release of CryENGINE 3.0. Rather than focusing singular on squeezing the most computation out of your enthusiast PC, CryENGINE 3.0's goal is to open gaming to the masses, by moving it partially to offline rendering and in-browser gaming.

While online gaming, or even 3D online gaming for that matter, is nothing new really, Warface is perhaps the first true cloud-based AAA PC FPS.

To that end Crytek has launched a new hub dubbed "GFACE" where users will play multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) games and interact. The hub -- and the games inside (CryENGINE 3.0/Warface) -- require a browser with the latest in web rendering technology. Hence currently only Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Chrome and The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox are support; Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) brand-new Internet Explorer 11 and Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) Safari are not currently compatible.

The good news, though, is that Warface is entirely free. How Crytek plans to monetize this cloud giveaway remains to be seen, but traditionally a significant portion of its revenue came from licensing its CryENGINE to third parties, so this may be more of a proof of concept to build a buzz, with the payoff being third party licensing pickups.

You can run GFACE/Warface on a rather minimalist hardware spec -- a 2.0 GHz CPU, 1.5 GB of RAM, and decade old video card (think Radeon X1950), thanks to the cloud doing most of the dirty work. Still gamers are advised to get slightly newer systems, to allow for higher framerates and more graphical niceties. All of this indicates that Warface should run very well on laptops -- unlike Crytek's earlier hardware-crunching products, such as last year's best-selling Crysis 3.

The game has four classes:

... with some classes like engineer taking a couple of hours of gameplay to unlock.

The new title was developed heavily by Crytek's new Seoul, South Korea office. Yohan Kim, Managing Director of Crytek Seoul cheers, "Crytek’s proven pedigree with its multi-award winning AAA FPS games combined with our own cutting-edge technology CryENGINE® 3 and our dedicated team of experts makes us confident Warface will revolutionize the genre and become the next generation in online FPS."

There are many advantages to the cloud -- cross platform compatibility and easier access to your data on the go. But there are also downsides, aside from pure security concerns. For hardware makers it's a mix bag as the cloud is minimizing the value of client-side hardware, making consumers likely to upgrade their laptops and desktops at a slower pace; but by the same token the cloud requires lots of new server hardware on the enterprise side, so it's not all bad news for OEMs. Access in the case of internet outage or when traveling through areas with unreliable internet is another major issue.

But like it or not, the cloud is gaining a lot of momentum and now Crytek is looking to become the marquee face of cloud gaming.

Latency is only an issue for your character and the enemy characters. Latency is not an issue on buildings, on backgrounds, and on day/night shadow effects... it does matter if that impact effect on the wall is off by 90ms, or the shadow is off by 90ms, it matters when you bullet is off by 90ms.

So you make the local client render out the player character and opposing players/npcs, and make the server render out everything else.

Which dramatically reduces what the local client has to do. I really hope this is put to use in XBox One. In current gen games like Mass Effect 3, you have nicely detailed foregrounds, but then the backgrounds are all matte paintings, so why not use server hardware to do high quality moving backgrounds instead of paintings?

quote: so why not use server hardware to do high quality moving backgrounds instead of paintings?

Because you'd never get that to synch up, or possibly even done at all at that "sprite" level.

As noted before, I'll believe this magic when I see it. Not gonna buy it at all until I see it work in the real world on somebody's DSL or cellular wifi connection. With *real* work done on the server side in realtime - not all with a fat client download.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer